In the pre-reform China when employment was predominantly provided in public sector, occupational welfare was the major form of welfare provision in urban areas. Welfare services and benefits were distributed largely by work units and were highly hierarchical, linking to recipients’ social strata and official ranks in a bureaucratized employment system. A major movement in social policy in the reform era has been to socialize welfare. Social policy reforms gained momentum after 1993 when economic reforms accelerated and led to increasing liberalization of economy and privatization. Many commentators have pointed out that with the socialization of welfare, work-unit-based occupational welfare has diminished or even disappeared. However, recent evidence indicates that occupational welfare has never died out in the public sector. On the contrary, it has taken new forms and become more concentrated on the professional-managerial-bureaucratic class. This paper explores the types of occupational welfare available to employees in the public sector, and argues that contrary to its populist nature before, today’s occupational welfare becomes more elitist and represents the burgeoning power of professionals, managers and bureaucrats in the public sector.
This paper examines the operational concept of non-government and non-profit organizations of aging services in China. Using both qualitative and quantitative data collected from 2009 in Nanjing China from 140 elder care homes, we examine the emerging non-government non-profit aging services by exploring the ownership-types, definitions, funding sources, facility characteristics, and actual operations of all urban elder care facilities in the city of Nanjing. Study findings provide a comparative understanding of government and non-government facilities in occupancy rate, residents’ case-mix and payer mix characteristics. Study results shed light for the understanding of a blurring boundary between government and non-government, for-profit and non-profit, nursing homes and elder-care agencies. Discussions highlight policy implications of such ambiguities for a growing aging service industry and for a growing middle class elderly population among the rapidly aging Chinese baby-boomers. Policy recommendations are given to the relevant issues raised.
This paper sets out to examine Japanese cultural propaganda and advertising activities in modern China through a study of the newspaper advertisements appearing in such important Chinese newspapers founded in modern era as Shenbao and Shengjing Shibao and other supplementary materials such as calendar posters. By treating these data that have long been overlooked by historians, mass communication researchers and sociologists—as historical materials of cultural value, examining three historical periods, namely the late Qing period (1868-1911) when Japanese products began to sell in China after the Russo-Japanese War, the period of developing capitalism in the Republic of China era (1911-1931) and the 15-year Sino-Japanese War period (1931-1945), and following the analytical textual models of colonialism and modernity, it will explore the characteristics of Japanese medicine and cosmetics advertisements selling in China and the “modernity of Hygiene and Beauty” reflected in them. It will also make a rigorous enquiry into the role of advertising in propagating imperialist Japan’s representations circulating in the public sphere and into the impact of advertising activities selling “dongyanghuo (goods from East Asia/Japan)” on the social and cultural life of China in the modern age. It argues that the Japanese imperial propaganda not only relied on the opinions expressed by private Japanese scholars and government, but to a great extent, benefited from the powerful image of the Empire as ―the leader of Asia and the leading modern country in Asia created by Japanese enterprises promoting sales.
The thirty volumes of I-shin-pō, edited by Tanba Yasuyori, were presented to the Emperor in 984. This medical compendium brought together many ancient medical and pharmaceutical works, some of which originated in China. Korea and India; others concerned Japanese practices. It is the oldest extant medical text in Japan but many of its component parts are now lost. Among the lost works is Seng-shen-fang edited by Seng-shen, an obscure Buddhist monk of Six Dynasties China, Philological research has revealed that Seng-shen-fang comprised forty volumes, was a compendium of various different braches of medicine, and itself cited a lot of its precursors’ works. Seng-shen was distinguished as a specialist on beriberi, a new disease that afflicted the people of Six Dynasties China, who had migrated from the north. Beriberi was typical of the new strange diseases encountered by Han Chinese migrants to the Chang-jiang river basin.
This article seeks to examine citations from Seng-shen-fang included in I-shin-pō, inorder to explore both the nature of this lost work and the impact of Buddhist medicine as Buddhism spread east. The conclusion must be that Chinese Buddhists employed medical treatments to aid religious propagation and expansion.
China’s transition from a centrally planned to a market oriented economy has led to an implosion of China’s healthcare system. To remedy this problem, China has set up urban and rural medical insurance systems to cover urban and rural residents, but a substantial population has been overlooked in this process, the 210 million rural migrants (migrants), who are neither rural nor urban residents, living in urban areas. As a result of the hukou system, a household registration system, migrants’ healthcare is considered the responsibility of their hukou governments, and not host cities.
Given migrants’ poor living and working conditions, healthcare is a major concern; and they are in dire need of medical coverage. However, although many migrants believe that healthcare is important and should be a public good, they do not value medical insurance and are not pressuring local governments for medical insurance. This lack of demand has contributed to the overall low medical coverage among migrants in cities, and thus understanding the factors contributing to this phenomenon can provide insights on ways to better design health policy for this population in China and in other developing countries. Using survey data and in-depth interviews from Shanghai, this paper argues that while socioeconomic status is important, it is the mismatch between existing policy and the actual medical needs, plus migrants’ lack of expectation from the state to provide social services that are the main drivers behind why migrants are not demanding medical insurance from the state.
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